Can fake raid be converted to linux software raid?
 

I'm sorta a n00b, so I hope I'm posting in the correct place.

I'm happily using Suse Pro 9.2. I was using a Highpoint RocketRaid 1640 with 4 hard drives in a raid0+1 configuration using the open source drivers off the highpoint web site.

Well I got the urge to tweak, so I made me a 2.6.10 kernel with a bootsplash and CIOCGDEV patch.

I came to find out that I could no longer compile the highpoint open source drivers and figured it was time to use the linux kernel raid support instead, I had heard it was a better option anyway.

Well this lead me down the path of finding and learning about DMRAID. Cool little utility... however... I would like to know how I can convert these raided driver to regular linux software raid drives so the Suse boot.md script can do all it's nifty raid configuring etc. without all the **** I had to mangle to get it mounting with dmraid. I guess when i say regular, I mean I can manage it with the Suse partitioning tools and have suse mount it etc. without my hackery.

So to re-iterate, I have my Highpoint raid mounting with dmraid, is there no way to move thise to a regular linux software raid so that suse can just recogize it and start it up normally?

-James

Your Highpoint Raid is a hardware raid, nothing fake about it. If it's not supported in later kernels and you want to do a software raid, remove the card from your system and attach the drives either to the existing connections or you may have to get an expansion card to connect your drives, if they're either SCSI or IDE.. etc.

But to tell you the truth, hardware raid seems to fail less than software raid. Having hardware control the raid takes less load off the cpu and system. You'll get better performance as well.

There is plenty fake about it. The highpoints bios is loaded into ram and executed. It has no coprocessor whatsoever. This is true of all cheap low end raid cards. No processing is actually being done on the highpoit other than the standard ATA stuff that all IDE controllers do. When I load the HPT366 module, it recognizes the drives as vanilla ide drivers.

The only difference between linux software raid and highpoints raid is that its a different piece of software. Not to mention, using the linux software raid, throughput is actually faster, since there is no real co-processor on the high point.

I understand what your saying since I just mentioned hardware raid in general having better performance.. If your looking for performance along with compatibility with your newer kernel, get a newer hardware based raid controller.. but other than that, your better off yanking that card out and plugging in your drives in an alternative way to setup software raid.